Deadlines are looming for DebConf10 - some have already passed. For
example, the last day to submit a BoF (Birds of a Feather) talk has
come and gone. There is still lots you can do for DebConf10 however
including volunteering time, lending equipment, and even donating
money. Sponsors and donors are needed to help defray the costs of
holding DebConf10 as Raphael Geissert wrote on his blog.

Joey Hess also blogged
about DebConf10 saying Let us get you to
DebConf -- I promise you won't regret it! There is still time (you
have until the 15th of May) to contact Joey about this year's special
funding to get you to DebConf10.

Adam Barratt and the release team sent out an update
on the status of
transitions, Release Critical bugs and a Timeline of the Squeeze freeze.
In short, we have a way to go before Squeeze is frozen and it is difficult
for the release team to estimate when Squeeze will get frozen. Adam writes
In order to help us keep a clearer picture of which changes still need to
occur before we can freeze, we will be introducing a 'transition freeze'
before the end of this month. If you have not yet discussed your transition
with the Release Team, please ensure that you have done so before May 21st.

The release team is already working on some transitions now, like Qt4 and
gnome-desktop, which are finished. The KDE team is working on KDE 4.4 with
the goal of having as up-to-date and stable version of the KDE suite as is
possible. To quote Adam: We're also close to completing the evince /
totem-pl-parser transition, which means we're well on the way to have
GNOME 2.30 in Squeeze.

Even though the descending slope of the RC bug graph is pretty
impressive, we still have about 400 RC bugs in Squeeze. Some of
them are waiting for packages to transition from unstable to testing,
but there's still a large number which need working on.
On this every DD can help out by NMUing packages which are currently
affected by RC bugs. Please remember that releasing is a collective
effort and it is not enough to just have your own packages RC-bug free
(although it's a good start) to be able to release. So, if you can help,
please choose an RC bug, fix it :-) and NMU it, possibly
to the DELAYED queue so that the maintainer can react if needed.

Being invited to the recent Ubuntu Developer Summit, Debian Project
Leader Stefano Zacchiroli gathered
feedback and examples about the relationship between the two projects.
Most interesting where of course success stories, epic fails and
requests from the Debian Project at large to the Ubuntu community. Later
he posted a link to his slides (a video is also available) also
containing some figures, e.g. that roughly 75% of all packages in Ubuntu
are taken without further patches directly from Debian. Stefano later
posted a summary
of his talk and the feedback he got.

With Debian's Kernel Team moving firmware files (binary data needed for
some hardware like network interface cards) in separate packages in
Debian's non-free section, Kurt Roeckx wondered,
if that approach could lead to usage problems especially during
installation and if these files should be added to the installation media.
Several people pointed out, that the debian
installation system already supports loading firmware from a separate
installation media, e.g. a USB stick. That however would still be to
complicate for many users or use cases (e.g. remote installation). In the
end Steve Langasek proposed
to offer normal installation media without non-free firmware files and an
easy to use tool, which would add the distributable non-free firmware files
to the installation media image.

Debian System Administrator Martin Zobel-Helas announced
a new version of the Debian Machine Usage Policies becoming effective on July
04th, 2010. The DMUP basically covers what Debian Developers may or may not
do with their accounts on debian.org hardware. The change was necessary to clarify
responsibilities between the Debian System Administrators and the Debian
Account Managers.

Debian New Maintainer Frontdesk Member Enrico Zini reminded
Developers on how to properly advocate applicants for the new maintainer
process. While advocation message don't need to be cumbersome and long, he
highlights that only persons, who already have actively contributed to
Debian should be advocated.

Debian System Administrator Peter Palfrader welcomed some volunteers
for maintaining
porter chroot environments on different architectures. He also gave some
guidelines on how developers should request installation of packages in
these chroot environments.

Bdale Garbee bloged about sponsored
LWN subscriptions where HP
sponsors the subscription fee to access LWN.net for Debian Developers and · just
recently introduced · for Debian Maintainers. He also noted, that
currently 571 Debian Contributors use this service.

Debian System Administrator Peter Palfrader asked
that all bug reports concerning the removal of undistributable packages
should also be sent to the maintainers of the snapshot.debian.org service.

According to the unofficial
RC-bugs count, the upcoming release, Debian 6.0
Squeeze, is currently affected by 370 release critical bugs. 72 of them
have already been fixed in Debian's unstable branch. Of the remaining
298 release critical bugs, 37 already have a patch (which might need
testing) and 20 are marked as pending.

Ignoring these bugs as well as release critical bugs for packages in
contrib or non-free, 180 release critical bugs remain to be solved for the
release to happen.

Please note that these are a selection of the more important security
advisories of the last weeks. If you need to be kept up to date about
security advisories released by the Debian Security Team, please
subscribe to the security mailing
list for announcements.

Currently 607 packages are orphaned and 120 packages are up for adoption.
Please take a look at the
recentreports
to see if there are packages you are interested in or view the complete list of
packages which need
your help.

Please help us create this newsletter. We still need more volunteer writers
to watch the Debian community and report about what is going on. Please see the
contributing
page to find out how to help. We're looking forward to receiving your mail
at debian-publicity@lists.debian.org.